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YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks and Secret YouTube Meeting

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Re: YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks and Secret YouTube Meeting

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't seriously compare the legal system, where you're innocent till proven guilty, with evidence, hearings, lawyers and multiple levels of appeal with what YouTube has created: non-transparent judge, jury and the executioner in one, extremely biased moderators. Yeah, it's not as bad as Twitter, but it looks like it's getting there.

What YouTube has created is a direct consequence of the structural incentives of the civil justice system which reflects it's practical outcomes quite well.

Civil justice = mob justice.

Combine that with the fact that the group in charge of moderation is likely to be extremely biased, simply by being Google employees, this is hardly any justice at all.

Re: YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks and Secret YouTube Meeting

#42
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What culture-specific reasonings are you referring to, exactly?

The US is unusually sensitive about naked bodies and swearing for instance. In most countries it's unusual to BEEP swear words on TV, and in some other countries nobody will bat an eye at casual nudity, even in TV shows aimed at children.

Meanwhile excessive violence is permitted on regular TV.

Re: YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks and Secret YouTube Meeting

#43
So if your video in any way can be considered provocative, there’s guaranteed a checkbox to shut it down.

Talking positively about drugs? Based on facts? Who cares, it’s against the status quo. Put it down!

Confronting feminists with facts? Offensive, intolerant! Push the button, shut it down.

Etc.

I find this deeply problematic, but I guess the root of the problem here is YouTube’s de-facto video-monopoly.

If there were more and bigger video-services besides YouTube that wouldn’t be so much of a problem. Then publishers could migrate to a platform with less censorship.

Re: YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks and Secret YouTube Meeting

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in insurance. My job was making judgement calls that could stand up in court. I worked for a very large insurance company. I am pretty confident that other large companies, like Google, operate rather similarly with regards to making sure they can defend their decisions in court, if necessary.

Haha no. Google, Fb, Twitter, Youtube - they all do not have the incentive to do so, as there is no way to sue one of them for wrongful account termination. With my telco, I can sue - and unless I'm more than 3 months behind in payment they legally can't cut me off in Germany. Who says that the social media giants shouldn't be regulated in the same way, given their importance in today's world?

Insurance is very highly regulated. It falls under federal rules for both financial industries and health, so it is subject to both Gramm-Leach-Bliley and HIPAA.

And when the actuarials decide some benefit is costing the company too much, they send the policy to legal who reinterprets the language and then the entire claims department gets retrained on how to pay the benefit correctly and informed we have been doing it wrong for the past 20 years.

So, ha ha yourself. They have an in-house legal department to justify whatever the heck they plan to do anyway. They just want all their ducks in a row from the start. The lawyers basically get paid to get the company's story straight ahead of time. It's quite mind-boggling that insurance is even legal as an industry.

Re: YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks and Secret YouTube Meeting

#45
post #30

Google is an American company. Their "rules" are extremely embedded in a US culture. Unfortunately YouTube is a product that is consumed worldwide. Many of the regions where it has a dominant market share for web VoD do have cultural palates that are very different from the US. I feel Google should embrace their international position and be less biased in it's reasoning.

What culture-specific reasonings are you referring to, exactly?

Days of discussion around a staged nipple reveal during the superbowl come to mind. /s

Re: YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks and Secret YouTube Meeting

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what advertiser wants to spend their time selecting videos to put their ads on? I don't see how your solution would be accepted. And automatic categorization doesn't work - otherwise Google wouldn't be spending money on humans.

Automatic detection of curse words and nudity does work, as far as I know. The regular categorization should be left to the publishers, but it should be much wider and multilevel, not the current choice of, what, 10 categories? Yes, other things like hate speech are harder to detect, but, as I said, it's extremely subjective, and should not be dealt with in a general way, but rather broken down into subcategories, li…

Yes, other things like hate speech are harder to detect

Exactly.

but, as I said, it's extremely subjective, and should not be dealt with in a general way, but rather broken down into subcategories, like "religion criticism", "radical feminism", "men's rights", etc, whatever ruffles people's feathers these days.

Unless you have some reason to think that a non-insignificant number of advertisers would be OK with ads on a subset of those categories but not all, that's just pointless busywork.

Re: YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks and Secret YouTube Meeting

#47
post #3

The rules to flag videos is here: https://imgur.com/a/uTLTS and they seem quite vague. Stuff like "Regular TV" is not something many people can understand. That said, is there a way to find the demonetized videos?

creaters can find the monetary status of the videos in their dashboard. They get notified whenever any of their video is demonitized.

Thanks but is there a way for non-creators to find it?

Re: YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks and Secret YouTube Meeting

#48

YouTubers are, as a group, the most entitled, selfish, immature group of people on the planet. They are constantly whining about what is an incredible service, that they are allowed to use, free of charge. The amount of time, money and effort it would cost for any of these "creators" to host their own multi-gigabyte videos with millions of downloads is mind boggling, yet they have little appreciation for the infrastr…

Your point is appreciated, but keep in mind that these are people's livelihoods. They're in a vulnerable position, and change is a big deal for them. Fairly small changes to the YouTube landscape could mean major changes to their income and business viability. Change a few bits of a suggestion algorithm and the kid making $11 million per year playing with toys could be out of business overnight.

It's the same reason people freak out when Apple does anything to the app store. It's life or death for a bunch of small companies and they have no power over the situation.

Re: YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks and Secret YouTube Meeting

#49
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense. The problem is that at the end of the day the decision will have to be made either by algorithms or by people. Algorithms are less nuanced, hard to write, and will often fail, people are expensive and biased. With the amount of videos youtube has to process, and without an almost human-level AI, I don't think there's a perfect solution. Algorithms flagging videos for review, and then humans making d…

The solution is obvious - tag/categorize the videos, according to very strict rules, let the advertisers decide which tags to serve. Allow the publishers to dispute the tags. For instance, "nudity" can be defined as "visible genitals, female nipples" in the US. "Controversial" tag should not even exist, it makes no sense, any non-trivial subject is controversial. And honestly, YouTube can benefit from a more precise…

I think a better solution is to have some core principles that Youtube's censorship team abides by. If the video in question doesn't violate all the principles (or X number of them), then it remains up.

Of course that is difficult and actually involves discussions, which Youtube doesn't seem interested in having.

Re: YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks and Secret YouTube Meeting

#50
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense. The problem is that at the end of the day the decision will have to be made either by algorithms or by people. Algorithms are less nuanced, hard to write, and will often fail, people are expensive and biased. With the amount of videos youtube has to process, and without an almost human-level AI, I don't think there's a perfect solution. Algorithms flagging videos for review, and then humans making d…

The solution is obvious - tag/categorize the videos, according to very strict rules, let the advertisers decide which tags to serve. Allow the publishers to dispute the tags. For instance, "nudity" can be defined as "visible genitals, female nipples" in the US. "Controversial" tag should not even exist, it makes no sense, any non-trivial subject is controversial. And honestly, YouTube can benefit from a more precise…

Afaik they already thought of that solution because YouTube videos support tagging/categories but it's the video uploader who sets those tags.

The problem is that once you introduce such a system, and leave all the control over the tags to the uploader, people start gaming it for better search rankings/more views. So you are back to the same old problem of "who checks if the content actually matches the tags".

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